


No Big Explosions (Except of the Heart)

by Trixen



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 04:15:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4691753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixen/pseuds/Trixen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after. When Angel returns, Buffy meets him at the airport.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Big Explosions (Except of the Heart)

_In her dreams, her world is dark woods and he is clean, new, whole. In her dreams, Buffy remembers. In her dreams, there is snow and snow angels, and the scars that the First left have vanished._  
  
In her dreams, Buffy loves, and loves, and loves.  
  
In her dreams, there is relief.   
  
+  
  
The news reaches her like news often does, not clipped to the wings of a dove. Rather, Dawn calls. Dawn calls, and as she looks out the window through grimy glass, the sun sets, hemorrhaging tangerine across the sky.  
  
Buffy owns a yoga studio, just off the High Street, tucked in an alley called Windrush Way. Although she doesn’t know her downward dog from her … well, whatever another yoga move might be called, it’s still a good front. Often, when Giles delivers the Potentials to her, they exclaim at the shined floors, purple mats, the wide mirrors like tunnels into a world with thousands of their faces.  
  
They want to actually _do_ yoga.  
  
When Dawn calls, there are a bunch of them out front, stretching, fiddling with the heat dial, complaining about the chill in the air. She’d reminded them, _we ARE in the North of England, girls, it’s not going to be the Caribbean_ and maybe her voice had been a bit snappish but REALLY.  
  
“Hellooo,” she says and hears a breath.  
  
“Hi.”  
  
“Dawn.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Buffy sighs. Her sister, the drama queen. “Are you going to form vowel sounds, Dawnie, or should I just use Morse code?”  
  
The line crackles faintly. Millions of conversations, words, whispers, they skim alongside the phone call, like dozens of other universes, constellations, stars. Dawn takes another breath. “Not sure how to say this, tbh…”  
  
“Tee Bee what?”  
  
“To be honest,” Dawn huffs noisily. “Nevermind. Listen – Buffy, he’s back.”  
  
“I thought you broke up with him.”  
  
“Not Randy—“  
  
“Thank God, that’s such a terrible name.”  
  
“Buffy, stop and listen to me.”  
  
She stops. She listens.  
  
“It’s Angel. I saw him today. He’s back.”  
  
And Buffy looks out of the window, at the setting sun, and she thinks _Oh_ that is all _Oh_ and her world reduces, it dissolves, much like Los Angeles did when it sunk into the arms of Mother so long ago.  
  
+  
  
In the back of her office, there is a door. Buffy goes through it hours later, and opens up into the garden, the courtyard actually, and she thinks she sees Giles off to her right – yes, his voice, he’s on his phone, urgent, distressed. The smell of trees, of girl. It occurs to her she’s slightly – just slightly – drunk. She opened a few bottles of wine after Dawn called and they all drank on the yoga mats while she sat alone in her office, the red in the heart of her throat.  
  
It’s cold, as cold as a river quickening around a bend, and she looks up. There is still a glass of wine in her hand. Buffy sips, stares at their home. They own a whole block of flats that they converted years ago to one big space, knocked through walls, connected rooms, let light in.  
  
“You heard, I presume?”  
  
Buffy doesn’t turn, but she does nod. “It would have been hard not to.”  
  
“Los Angeles…” Giles murmurs.  
  
Yes. It was a stinking hole in the earth, hills and valleys of bone and ash and metal. It was a soup of sidewalks and street lamps, fireplaces and fire hoses, and what could there have been left? A policeman told her it reminded him of a plane crash – only molecules left, and how appropriate that seemed – a nose dive straight to the heart of the earth. Hadn’t it – and he – rushed away as quickly as they could?  
  
She used to ask the question. _What if I could reach down there with my fingers and pry him loose?_  
  
And  
  
_Who would I choose? If I had to choose? Would I leave Spike down there, or Angel?_  
  
And  
  
_That isn’t a question. But it deserves to be asked. It deserves consideration._  
  
“Did anyone else get out?” she asks.  
  
Giles takes the wine from her hand, drinks some himself. “Not that I’m aware of. The dragon – we thought – well, we were wrong. I don’t know. I don’t know.”  
  
“You’re talking to yourself,” she murmurs affectionately, snatching the wine back.  
  
“I’m talking to you.”  
  
“Not actually.”  
  
“Perhaps not. I don’t know what to think at this juncture. It seems – inexplicable. How could Angel have emerged from – that devastation? And where has he been?”  
  
“All excellent questions,” Buffy whispers. “Points for effort.”  
  
“Thank you,” he replies dryly.  
  
“What do we do now?”  
  
“You haven’t asked me that in a long while, Buffy.”  
  
She nods, soft. “I thought it was time.”  
  
+  
  
That night, as stars rush into the sky, rivers of light and sound, and she lies in the bath, her phone rings.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Succinct.” His voice is wry.  
  
She drops the phone by the side of the tub, her arm trailing, her head dipping beneath. The water is pale, sweet, silent.  
  
She’s not sure how long she stays under. It seems ages, but it’s probably only about fifty seconds of churchlike quiet. When she picks up the phone, she’s afraid to speak into it. Afraid he’ll be gone, it will all have been a dark wooded dream, Dawn never called, the world is spinning as it would and did but never as it _should_.  
  
“Angel?”  
  
“Hi,” he says, and of course he’s still there. Where else would he be?  
  
“You’re alive.”  
  
“Not exactly.”  
  
“Funny,” she says, and she can taste her own grief in her mouth, taste it like food in her mouth.  
  
+  
  
When he arrives, the first thing she notices is his body, and she thinks how gross and typical that is, that nothing can stop _tha_ t but what else is there? He drops his bag on the floor by the hallway to her room and the fabric of his shirt moves with him, like breaths or gasps. His arms are strong, the breadth of his shoulders, and her stomach feels punched out, unruly.  
  
It was what he said to her at the airport, simple and sweet. “Something interesting happened while I was down there.”  
  
And she knows even before she quips about Hell and demons on the Barbie and God knows what else – she knows even before the words trip off of her tongue.  
  
Something interesting. _Right_.  
  
Angel looks at her now.  
  
“Take off your clothes.” His voice is slightly hoarse.  
  
There, in the hall, with the walls around them as bare as white throats, she does.  
  
She starts with her top, then her skirt, her bra, her underwear with its lace at the edges and she sees his eyes go black as a night without stars, as black as an ocean in space, and he takes one step toward her, his palm at her hip, his other at his zipper, and he lifts her, lifts her _onto_ him, and Buffy’s head falls back, her neck arcing like a blood jet, uncontrollable, unstoppable.  
  
She makes a sound, and his face is at her throat, at the sweat gathering there, and it isn’t even that she can feel his pubic hair against her clit – Angel’s pubic hair, rough and dark – it isn’t even that he’s wetting his finger and slipping it down to her ass, it isn’t that she wants to growl and keen and murmur dirty nothings like _fuck m_ e and _harder jesus Christ harder harder go as deep as you can_ – but she feels as if she’s coming apart just by the simplicity of his dick inside of her, Angel’s cock, his flesh and heartbeat, plumbing her, ravaging her, _fucking her_.  
  
He pushes her against the wall and keeps one hand splayed over her heart, where the cross once lay that burnt him, and he has two fingers inside of her, moving with the thrust of his hips, and she’s lost track of how many times she’s come against him and around him, her clit rubbing mercilessly against that hair – _oh God please_ –  
  
Angel lifts her wrist and his fangs are in her like she’s butter. He goes rigid, their eyes locking in that moment, as he almost breaks her open, coming with the taste of her blood in his mouth.  
  
It is relief, in its purest, basic, most ardent form – the blood, the years, the  
  
tears on her face, tears as salt as the Pacific.  
  
  
\+ _Finis_  



End file.
